Fonts in Rick Schaut’s blog
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshMarch 22nd, 2004 • 11:04 pm
I don’t know what MacBU developer Rick Schaut uses to create his blog pages, but if it’s a Microsoft product (and there is some reason to suspect that it is), it doesn’t reflect well either on the company or on him as a software user personally.
If you go to this page, for example, you’ll see that, in a single web page, Rick manages to use a mix of at least four different fonts: Verdana, Arial, Times New Roman, and Garamond.
Needless to say, it’s not pretty. A look at the HTML code of the page doesn’t bring any comfort either, what with font face tags, tag arguments without quotes, and CSS style definitions that include absolute font sizes in points.
Yuck. And with all that, Rick has the nerve to include this line:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >
at the top of the page. Needless to say, Rick’s page is not valid HTML 4.0 Transitional code!
And it gets worse: If you check his XML feed using popular Mac OS X news aggregator NetNewsWire, you’ll see that Rick’s feed also manages to causes NetNewsWire to render text in all kinds of different fonts.
I am afraid I can only view this as a confirmation of the endemic level of sloppiness that characterizes most of what Microsoft produces.
March 23rd, 2004 at Mar 23, 04 | 12:41 am
Well, your blog doesn’t validate either :P
so much drama?
March 23rd, 2004 at Mar 23, 04 | 1:02 am
Mmm, it did the last time I checked. But you’re right, it doesn’t today. Although I’d like to think that the reasons why it doesn’t are rather more subtle than the ones in Rick’s blog :).
One of them is due to the ellipsis in your comment :). Either you typed it as a ellipsis (rather than three periods) or pMachine did the conversion automatically. (pMachine is not perfect in that department.)
As for the other issues, they’ll be fixed soon :).
March 23rd, 2004 at Mar 23, 04 | 1:20 am
Hehe, no offense – I typed it as an ellipsis ;)
Yes, the non-closed <br> tags and the missing </div> tag are probably easily fixed, as opposed to the stuff the validator spouts out for Rick’s blog.
March 23rd, 2004 at Mar 23, 04 | 1:36 am
They are already fixed :). Some old habits:
instead of
and manual error due to imperfect AppleScript script:
applied to
As for the
(it was an extra one, not a missing one, actually), it must have been there for a while — a bad cut-and-paste at some stage, I suspect.
The ellipsis thing is a pain (like the ligatured oe in French). Everybody has been using it for years, but since it’s not part of ISO-Latin1… (Whoever came up with that particular standard!)
Thanks for pointing this out to me.